Nevermore: You Came Back, Low Pressure, and Sarah's Key

To paraphrase Faulkner, the past is never really past. It exists in the present too. The Nevermore fiction choices all seem to reflect that sentiment in one way or another.

One of our Nevermore reviewers was much taken with You Came Back by Christopher Coake. Mark Fife was devastated by death of his young son, Brendan.  His marriage to his college sweetheart fell apart, and they divorced.  Just as he is starting to put his life back together with a new girlfriend and a flourishing career, he gets a call from a woman who lives in the Fifes’ old house.  She claims that the house is haunted—by Brendan. Our reviewer found it to be a moving exploration of love, loss, and relationships, and said she couldn’t put it down.

Continuing the theme of how past and present can collide, Low Pressure by Sandra Brown was mentioned as a good light read.  A young woman writes a novel based on her sister’s murder eighteen years earlier, causing a tabloid reporter to take an interest in the case.  Unfortunately, someone else takes an interest too—someone who may know more about what really happened that stormy day.

Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay begins with Julia,  an American journalist living in Paris with her husband and daughter. She’s asked to write an article about the Nazi round-up of  Jews in Paris, which happened 60 years previously.  As she begins her research, she finds out the apartment where they’re currently living had belonged to a Jewish family caught in the round up. The book goes back and forth in time, weaving together the story of Sarah Starzynski  in 1942 and Julia’s life in the present.  This book has come up several times in Nevermore, and has always been highly recommended.